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I like to say, the reason it’s important to include, “until death do we part,” in marital vows, is that you want the soul contract of marriage to end at the physical bodies death. As much as you love each other, you may or may not choose to come back together in another lifetime.

Relationship soul agreements are commitments you make to another person that last beyond your body’s lifespan. Love, romance, sensual steamy desire for another and elation when you are with the beloved is one of the primary drivers in our soul experience.

Connection with the beloved, when at its climax, feels like your soul’s reason for being. We all want to feel in love, to be in love, to feel loved, to feel seen, to be cherished by our beloved, and desired. To feel alive in the presence of the other.

Then why is love so hard? Why do long-term relationships seem to be more about working stuff out, tolerance, and compromise, then being turned on? And why are short-term relationships often so fraught with misunderstanding?

I believe it is because, through the power of love, you are fulfilling your soul agreements.

Beyond the hormones, mental and emotional attraction to partnership, there is this deep river of your soul’s drive to resolve unresolved experiences, or complete incomplete agreements. Unresolved or incomplete experiences are created by both positive, ecstatic love connection, and not so positive, painful interactions.

You come back together in your relationship soul agreements to either recreate an amazing feeling you want to experience again, or to resolve the old karma of a painful or traumatic experience. Maybe both.

For example, you may feel strongly that you are meant to be with someone who doesn’t feel the same for you. You have an unresolved soul agreement with them. One they are choosing not to show up for in this lifetime. Or you may feel compelled to stay in an abusive relationship because of your past life together. Karma that keeps you feeling you have a debt to pay or aren’t free to leave.

Our souls create relationship agreements both consciously and unconsciously. Marriage is a conscious agreement. But what type of soul agreement is created through physical intimacy? While science has some interesting things to say about love, there is little acknowledgment given to the soul’s experience of sexual connection.

Both partners enter with their own beliefs and soul agreements to play out. Is the intimacy a new celebration of what’s possible or is it revisiting an old soul agreement? The impact of merging energy goes beyond the mind, emotions and body.

Seeking consciousness of your relationship soul agreements and directly communicating what they mean to you with your lover is the best way to create positive love connections. It is vulnerable but powerful. It helps you avoid going down a painfully familiar path and unconsciously recreating repeat experiences. Experiences that may create more of the pain they were trying to heal.

You have the power to update, change or end your relationship soul agreements. The more you release of the souls unresolved experiences with your beloved the more joy is possible in the present. You stop working out old karma and start enjoying the moment.

Here’s a free guided meditation I made to help you update your soul agreements: Download

Throughout my life, I have often been a grounding support for those around me. In business, friendships, with lovers and family. While being grounded comes naturally, it has been an ongoing lesson to learn healthy energy exchange when helping someone I love through a rough spot. If you find yourself helping others too, you may relate to how it can throw your energy off balance.

Early in life, I learned through experience, that I had to help others around me be grounded and give them some of my energy so they could be available to care for my needs.

Grounding for someone meant I would give a part of my foundation (root chakra) to help them stabilize. Letting someone tap into my energy (solar plexus chakra) meant I would feel depleted and find myself spending time on things that weren’t important to me but made them feel better.

Later in life I learned that it wasn’t healthy to have others ground through me or tap into my energy. I learned to set my space and psychically show the person a grounding cord near their root chakra that they could have. rather than grounding through me. When aware of a cord into my energy, I would detach the energy cord from my solar plexus chakra and attach it to the Divine (God). These are loving tools.

My work with these tools and beliefs has helped me have better boundaries in helping others. And yet there was an aspect of my belief about helping others that wasn’t working for me anymore. It didn’t acknowledge the healthy way to help others ground and share my energy. And healthy reasons to do so.

My perception of what’s healthy or what works for me is shifting, or perhaps I’m just seeing it with a new level of clarity. With my sense of self-care solid from the healthier energetic boundaries, now I see that I can help others without losing my equilibrium. In fact, I have been and they don’t need to ground through me or take my energy.

I see it like holding a child’s bike seat lightly while they learn to balance. The child is pedaling forward and they are learning. They just need a little help to stabilize their momentum so they can get confident in their ability to ride.

This type of energy sharing support is short-term, like training-wheels, and does not get in the way of self-responsibility. On the other end of the spectrum is co-dependent help. Control that gets something out of being needed and doesn’t want to let go of the bike. A steadying hand does not steer the bike. It is the compassion, strength, stability we all need when the world gets rocky.

Giving of yourself by steadying a loved one’s balance until they can do it for themselves works when the energy exchange is reciprocal over time. In this way, they can remember how it feels and how to access it. This is grace, kindness, healthy help.

Healthy grounding and energy comes from the heart chakra rather than the root chakra or solar plexus. It is more than showing someone a tool. It’s actually assisting them with the experience during a challenging time (loss, trauma, change, life disruption). Allowing them to regain their equilibrium, without being sucked into additional suffering.

There is always a time for healthy help delivered with boundaries, love, kindness and compassion. The difference between grounding FOR someone and SUPPORTING someone so they can re-ground is a massively different energy exchange for both people involved. It holds your loved one lightly so they stay balanced and don’t fall farther out of touch with themselves. You can do this type of giving while staying balanced and empowered.

Being naked before another, merging bodies, vulnerable with desire, allows the soul to be seen in ways not available in other forms of relationship. A soul agreement with the beloved, the pleasure and intensity that it offers, is one of the strongest, if not THE most powerful desire of the body-soul experience.

Its power is in merging and vulnerability. It draws out all of your beauty as well as sneaks its way into your shadowy corners. It can be unfathomably supportive or painfully destructive.

Seeking or finding your soul mate, has a resonance of destiny. If you don’t feel seen or fully connected with your lover, you may not believe you are with your soul mate. Yet something unexplainable keeps you together. You can’t seem to break free even if this lover is not “the one.” You have yet to complete your soul agreement.

Does it feel like you “knew” each other before you met? Or are you just now finding each other for the first time this lifetime? What are you here to do together? Having a strong soul agreement can feel like you’ve found your soul mate, but have you?

Old soul agreements have many influences from one or more past life experiences. When you choose to come back together in the form of lovers /life partners, you have commitments to keep. It can be a simple as recreating the love you shared or as complex as paying a karmic debt. It always involves resolving incomplete past experiences together.

When you call in a new soul agreement for a lover /life partner, it can be an evolution of your soul. It can also be that you are ready for a different soul lesson and this lover is available to facilitate it.

Some connections end too soon, leaving a longing. The soul agreement not complete. Others last longer than you may think is needed. Once you’ve worked through your karma or kept your past life commitments to each other, the sense that there is something to do together may fade. A new agreement needs to be created for the relationship to thrive.

When a romantic partnership changes or ends, or if one or more partner is ready to change the form of the relationship, updating the soul agreement smooth’s the transition. Letting go is easier. Creating a new way is available.

A true soul mate is the beloved with whom you have a current soul agreement; one who is a kindred spirit, lover, friend and evolving with you as a soul.

You are born surrounded by parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins who are part of a web of souls coming together for a collective soul agreement. Your longest-term soul lessons come from family members, whether they are physically present or absent from your life. The way you receive or reject each other, nurture or neglect each other, control or empower each other, encourage or put-down each other.

Having a soul agreement with each of these key players in your life means:

It does not guarantee that you will keep these agreements. Nor that family will behave in a way that is loving, kind, helpful or growth oriented. Sometimes soul agreements involve retraction, contraction, obstacles, pain, loss, suffering or aloneness.

Family soul agreements are the juiciest kind as they get activated before your soul-body consciousness kicks in. The physical body’s early development is an incubation time for the soul. The soul in a new body has to surrender to an infant’s limitations and learn to eat, sleep, walk, talk, read, count and many other skills needed to survive.

In that early time when you are completely dependent on your care takers for survival, you are open to the imprint of your mother, father, siblings or others who take care of you. How they feel about themselves and how they feel about you forms your view of yourself. The lens you see the world through. Their beliefs and behaviors set unconscious programs in place that you may carry with you your entire life.

In the cauldron of their own soul lessons, your arrival into your family may have come with joy or fear. The tone of your arrival is reflective of your soul agreements with your family. You may have a soul agreement to arrive under the sunny energy of true love. Or you may have an agreement to come in at a certain time, even if the timing isn’t convenient for them, it may even be stressful or unwanted.

Soul agreements with family contain a heavy portion of loyalty, sometimes beyond what is healthy. Therefore, abandonment is exceptionally painful when it comes from family. The ripping away of the biologically programmed survival connection can forever haunt a person’s life.

If you’ve had difficult or abusive relationships with family members, it’s hard to image that your soul chose the agreement. Remember the future is not written. Each soul involved in a relationship has a choice and each day every soul chooses in every moment if they will listen to and live from their wounds and fears or seek healing and love.

So know that although you may have a soul agreement with difficult family members, it doesn’t mean you are required to continue to tolerate abuse. These souls may have an obligation to fulfill with you from a past life. They may have come in with the intention of healing and found the world around them cultivated more wounds, pain and fear.

If you are here to cultivate love and healing, which I suspect you are because you are reading this blog post, then you’re taking the opportunity to shift the trajectory of your soul agreements. You can alter these agreements through your spiritual intentions, through shifting what you are willing to experience with your family members.

You may love your family and also choose to complete your soul agreements with some of them at the end of this lifetime, or even before this lifetime ends. You also may set the intention to meet again in some future soul shape and journey in new ways. I offer guidance on how to do this in the post How to Change a Soul Agreement.

You have the power to heal, resolve or complete your family soul agreements even if the other person is not willing to participate in this shift. The simple truth in family soul agreements is that no matter which role you are playing in the family, parent, child or sibling, you are each other’s teachers.

While direct communication is important in relationships, it is not always an option as it relates to the intricacies of soul agreements. If you have a soul agreement that doesn’t feel peaceful, causes you pain or distraction, it is likely time to revisit the terms of the agreement to find your peace. You can do this with meditative visualization and communication with your spirit guides. There are also times when a soul agreement is so deep-seated that you will need outside help.

Before you start the visualization take a few moments to write down single words or short phrases as it relates to the soul agreement you are preparing to update:

What parts of the agreement would you like to change or discontinue experiencing?

What energies you would like to experience in the relationship if it is to continue?

Now with the above intentions in mind, begin this simple meditation to update or end a soul agreement. If you find it easier for to listen and be guided through a meditation, you can download free a recording of this soul agreement update meditation at this link:

Visualize a rose floating in front of you that symbolizes a relationship you are ready to change.

See a second rose beside it, like a magic wand; this second rose is there to remove any energy you are ready to release from that soul agreement.

Watch as details of your past or current soul agreement move out of the relationship rose into the wand-like rose. See any expectations, demands, control, punishment, anger, disappointment, fear, guilt, and shame move out of the soul agreement rose. Get specific with details of your relationship!

Once the relationship rose is free of these unwanted aspects, visualize the wand like rose with all of the energy you no longer desire gathered up in it, flying away to a faraway place. On that mountain top or over the ocean, see it dissolve with the intention that it causes no harm.

Now imaging a golden ball of light hovering above the soul agreement rose. Fill that ball of light with all of the positive intentions, new agreements and emotional energies you would like to experience in this relationship, such as: ease, grace, pleasure, fulfillment, joy, inspiration, flow, playfulness, support.

When the golden ball of light is FULL of good vibrations drop it into your soul agreement rose and see them become one.

Then ask your Akashic record keeper to update your soul records as well as to communicate this update to the soul records of the person with whom you are updating your soul agreement.

Please comment on this blog post with your experiences, questions and what you would like to learn next about your soul agreements!

People come into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime. When you figure out which it is, you’ll know exactly what to do. Michelle Ventor

A soul agreement relationship can feel confusing when you don’t know if it is for a reason, a season or a lifetime. Sometimes you get overly attached and the relationship ends. Other times you feel complete after the purpose of your work together is done. Not all people arrive to a sense of completion at the same pace.

If your agreement is for a reason, your encounter is generally quick. You get in a fender bender. The kindness that you and the other driver respond with provides an opportunity for both of you to heal your fears of a stranger’s anger. Agreements for a reason may show up to complete a past life commitment or be a Divine hand to point you in a different direction than you were heading.

Agreements for a season last longer. They can involve helping someone through a challenging time, or showing up for each other in ways that push you to evolve. They’re more likely to leave lingering feelings of attachment when they end.

A “season” soul agreement came through my life fifteen years ago. I worked with Theresa, a woman who was single and pregnant at forty. The father was older than her, and chose not to be involved although they’d been engaged when she got pregnant. He didn’t want to become a father again at his age. Her family was unavailable to support her.

One day at work she mentioned that she was going to start her Lamaze classes soon. I asked her, “Who is going with you?” She replied that she was going alone. I felt compelled to offer to go with her. She accepted my offer although we were only acquaintances. We attended birthing classes together and I was at the hospital when her daughter was born. We kept in touch for a year after the birth, but when I changed jobs we lost contact.

My soul agreement with Theresa and her daughter Hannah was simple; support them through this challenging time. Don’t let them go it alone. I felt compelled and can’t explain why, it was our soul agreement. A sure sign you have a soul agreement is when you feel compelled to do something beyond the level of your existing relationship.

I would love to know how they are doing, but our relationship agreement was completed in the season of Theresa’s pregnancy and first year of her daughter’s life. It faded with love, acceptance and appreciation on both sides.

You may feel sad or disappointed when a relationship fades after an intense journey shared together. Yet if you have completed your soul agreement it is natural that there is no draw to continue connecting.

In some cases, one person may be clear that the agreement is complete or they may decide not to complete their agreement in this lifetime. That can create residual karma and cause you pain. If you don’t feel at peace about the end of a relationship it is time to update your soul agreement. Alternately if you want to maintain a continued connection after the purpose of your coming together has been fulfilled, it helps to update your soul agreement with new intentions.

In next week’s blog I’ll provide a guideline for updating your soul agreements.

There are junctures in life, transitions that are a natural part of development or made by choice, that indicate a soul agreement change is an order. A parent-child relationship evolves to parent-adult, when the child grows up. Commitments made in a marriage end at the death of one partner or with a divorce. As I covered in an earlier blog post, the soul agreement goes beyond the psychological shift and change of physical circumstance.

In cases where there isn’t a clear relationship transition, it’s not as obvious that an update is in order. In a marriage of 30 years the agreement isn’t the same as it was at 5 years of marriage, yet aspects can be stuck in the original agreement. Here are a few clues to help you identify where you can benefit from changing your soul agreements.

When you repeatedly think about a past experience or have a mental conversation with a person who is not present. This is a person or situation with which you need to update your agreement. The conversation in your head kicks-in frequently when you relax and are not focused on a task. And sometimes it even disrupts something else you were thinking about or doing.

If you feel frustrated, dis-empowered or “off” from the persistent distracting thoughts, you might find yourself pushing the person away in your mind saying, “Leave me alone!” The disruption has purpose. It’s happening to let you know something is unresolved, that you need to release, shift or directly communicate in a relationship.

Another way you can know a relationship soul agreement needs to be updated is when you feel angry about expectations from a person that you don’t want to be required to fulfill. This anger helps you notice that you need to revise your boundary in the agreement. When an agreement is in need of update it often has low vibration emotions attached to it like guilt, shame, abandonment, judgment or control.

For example, you feel guilty for saying “no” to someone when they ask you to do something you’ve always done for them at work, like schedule a meeting for a group of people. Your job has changed and you are no longer in the position where that is part of the agreement. You need to set a new boundary and update your agreement to match the new role so others don’t continue to expect you to do things that were part of your old position.

In another case, you may have an agreement to listen to a friend when they have had a bad experience. They want to dump their pain or anger to feel better. And you’ve signed up through your choice to listen. You may have a sense of guilt for abandoning them in their suffering if you don’t listen. Yet every time you have a conversation where you get emotionally dumped on, you feel worse and your friend feels better. They may even thank you for being a good friend. The benefit of changing or ending an agreement like this is that it allows you to have your own experience, rather than getting thrown “off” or drained by their emotions and upset.

In summary, the primary signals that a relationship soul agreement is ready to be updated:

A relationship has clearly changed (end of job, romantic partnership)

A relationship has changed over time but the person is not honoring the change

A relationship drains your energy

You experience distracting or dis-empowering thoughts of the person

You feel negative emotions about something that used to be okay for you in a relationship

You have choice, free will, the ability to alter your life’s direction. You also live in a world with many other sentient beings that have free will and their choices effect your choices, resulting in outcomes that may be different than you’d hoped or expected.

Life begins with the soul agreements in your family. You have things to teach each other, karma to complete and promises to keep. Family members, both biological and adoptive, are key in your foundational soul agreements and the lessons you are here to learn. I believe that even your family is your choice; you made the choice before being born.

Then there are soul agreements we make fresh in this life. They may last a lifetime or be a onetime interaction to change our direction or teach us something. We always have free will in responding to any soul agreement.

Some people call it destiny but I see it more like a collection of agreements we’ve made as a soul in previous lifetimes to show-up to keep these agreements. For example, I have a friend who I met working at a clothing boutique during college. Little did we know at the time that we had a soul agreement to remind each other of our spiritual path?

She changed jobs and we lost touch. Then I saw her feeding burritos she’d made to the homeless and we reconnected. She moved. We lost touch again. Then again we reconnected by chance, or is it? Keeping this soul agreement has been dance we have done over more than 20 years.

At times it’s been tough, we’ve pushed each other too hard, resisted the reminders, inadvertently hurt each other but as we’ve matured and become more conscious of our agreement the waters of our friendship have calmed. They aren’t as choppy as they were when we were unconsciously trying to keep the agreement by shaking the other up. Now we are more direct, less easily offended, trust each other’s reflections and openly discuss our soul agreement.

We could have chosen to walk away permanently from this soul agreement at many junctures. There were years we didn’t speak but something deeper kept bringing us back to each other. Our soul agreement.

If we had exercised our free will and walked away without completing our agreement or without each separately doing our soul work to release the charge on that unfinished agreement, the energy would have continued to pull us back together in this lifetime or another lifetime to keep our agreement.

Just as you have free will so do those who you encounter in your life. When things seemingly go awry with your soul agreements it may be that choices are made from miscommunication, fear of change or concern for the impact on others the person is in agreement with. People you interact with may choose not to say “yes” to your soul agreement. Life moves you in a different direction. That doesn’t mean you have to allow it to haunt you.

In a soul agreement that you are ready to end, you can clear the energy without the participation from the other. I’ll cover the “how-to” in future blog posts. You can also choose to walk away without ending the agreement too. And allow the agreement to be fulfilled some way in the future.

We are born into a soul agreement with our parents and other family members, we make friends, go to school, have relationships, manage our finances, we may marry, have children, work, move homes and be part of various social circles over time. All of these experiences involve temporary or lasting soul agreements that are created with individuals or groups of people, places, inanimate objects and organizations.

As each of these agreements is created, it is created based on the needs and intentions of all parties at the time the agreement is initiated. Most relationship agreements are created with more unspoken and unconscious assumptions than openly acknowledged ones. Such as, “because we are married you will comfort me if I feel sad.” That may not be part of the agreement for both parties. Over time we experience changes in agreements such as moving to a new residence, the end of a relationship, a change of jobs or graduation from school.

Yet certain endings lingeringly haunt our thoughts. We know the relationship, job or phase of life is over but we don’t feel complete, the past is distracting and interfering with feeling at peace in the present. This isn’t a rational experience of the mind, it doesn’t line up with the external information we know to be true. It is the soul agreement that is still operating based on a past commitment.

We may also find that we are living in an agreement we no longer want to be in as it stands. Such as, relating with a parent that still treats us like a child, a partnership that has become emotionally abusive or a job that drains our energy the moment we walk into the door. We feel stuck and unable to change the experience, even though we’ve tried.

There is something deeper than our external circumstance that seems to be holding us in an agreement that is no longer serving us. It is the spiritual aspect of the agreement. A soul agreement transcends our physical obligations and our mental figuring. It is our soul’s contract to show-up in a specific way. We have the power to change our soul’s agreements and open to new more aligned experiences.

For the next few months I will be writing on this topic to help you understanding how the unspoken aspects for your agreements affect your energy, inner-peace and ability to create new agreements for yourself. I will give you tools to change, end or update your soul agreements.

We’ll look at the following types of agreements:

Family (parent, sibling, child)

Love partnerships

Friendships

Home (Community, Living Space)

Groups/Organizations: Work, School, Social Circles

Money

Activities (Sports, Arts)

Animals (Pets and Spirit Totems)

Spiritual Entities (angels, guides, genetically inherited and those taken on from others)

To build a foundation for shifting our agreements, I will cover the difference between agreements with others and the agreements with our Self. In our soul agreements with others, I will touch on how one party to the agreement may hold the power position in the creation of the “terms of the agreement” and the impact of that imbalance of energy. I will also cover how to intentionally create new soul agreements.

Please comment and ask questions here and on Facebook to let me know what you’d like me to focus on.

Judgment is a form of control used to move someone onto our agenda. The silent or embedded message it carries says, “Your choice is not acceptable to me, so choose something different that I’m comfortable with.” Energetically, judgment is an attempt to control our power center, the area just above the bellybutton (3rd chakra). It knocks us off-center to give the judge the power position. Or it allows them to hook into our energy and redirect it to their agenda.

Noticing how we respond to the energy of control attempts from judgments, allows us to strengthen our power by neutralizing the energy rather than getting knocked off-center by it. Some common responses to judgment are self-inquiry, seeking approval, self-sabotage or over achievement.

Self-Inquiry – The natural first response to someone’s judgment is self-inquiry. Is it true? Depending on the relationship we have with the person, we may just assume it’s true. This can translate into thinking something is wrong with us. Alternately it may be an opportunity to self-reflect, look at a dark corner in ourselves and decide if we want to keep feeding that aspect. The key indicator here is what our body is telling us, do we feel out-of sorts; is our stomach a bit anxious? Our body is our intuitions first barometer.

Seeking Approval – The most powerful people in our lives are the ones we love, second only to those in authority positions. When we love someone it is natural to want their approval. Even when we are just getting to know a person, we are determining their response to us and would like to be seen favorably. Judgment comes from unconscious or conscious beliefs that require change of another’s behavior to in order for them to receive approval. On the spirit level, when we alter what we know to be our truth in order to seek the approval of another, we are depleting our energy, giving a piece of ourselves away. This is the energetic hook that can become a chronic vampire of our life-force if we continue to deny our truth in order to please others.

Self-Sabotage – Feeling judged can cause us to feel angry. This anger is intended to show us our boundaries have been violated. When we are act from the anger we respond one of two ways, self-sabotage or over compensation. We may consciously say, “they are wrong.” But unconsciously believe the judgment and use our anger to propel us to some self-sabotaging behavior that proves them right. This is an extreme example of judgment throwing us off-center.

Over Achievement – Alternately we may feel the need to prove the judge wrong by excelling our efforts toward success in the direction we’ve chosen. This can be a form of competition energy or rebellion against the control. We have to demonstrate that we didn’t deserve the judgment through our success.

When we let judgment be the issue of the person judging by staying in our center, we retain our power. We don’t let the outside energy influence us to think less of our self, seek approval, self-sabotage, over achieve or throw us out of balance. We continue to be our true self rather than react in one of the other ways.

Reaction to judgment can actually be a catalyst that generates new experiences that we learn from whether through success or failure. But if we change our course to respond to another’s judgment we are still changing course, which means we are on a less direct path to the life we want.

Being aware of the energy behind judgment and practicing mediation to stay in alignment with our truth, helps us strengthen our ability to remain centered in the face of judgment and control. Then we are able to use the emotions we feel in response to being judged such as anger or uncertainty to set healthy boundaries, heal aspects of our self and even catapult us in a direction of our choosing.

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